His father was his first football hero. David played at Blackwood, as did his father before him and was a handy footballer but his career was interrupted firstly by military service in Vietnam then by a bad ankle injury sustained in his first match after he returned.

David is a gregarious chap, more than happy to talk about his son, but has a vein of honest appraisal that he has handed down to Brenton.

“He wasn’t by any means an outstanding young junior footy player, not at all,” he says.

The young Sanderson though was good enough to be picked in junior squads with SANFL club Sturt, whom he also supported, but David says even when that team made an under-13s grand final one year his son didn’t make the first 18.

He must have been disappointed; but Brenton continued to work hard at his game.

There were hours of kicking the ball with his father, and, strangely for a teenager, he was fastidious with his diet and refused soft drinks.

He was asked to try out for the state under-15 team but after months of training he again missed out until a selected player had to withdraw and he was called up.

According to his father, that was the point Brenton’s career took off.

He played well and for the next two years he was in the state under-17 team, made an All-Australian team, and made his senior debut for Sturt.

“He got a break when this kid pulled out,” David says. “It was a turning point.”

Make or breakSanderson was also included in the Crows’ initial 52- man squad when Adelaide joined the AFL in 1991.

He made his debut the following year but over the course of two years he played only six games.

Then, when he was 19, the Crows traded him to Collingwood.

Adelaide’s coach at the time, Graham Cornes, recalls with a grimace how difficult the decision was.

“He was a great young kid, the type of person you could build a club around,” Cornes says.

But footy priorities came first. Sanderson trailed players such as Nigel Smart and Ben Hart, who would become club greats, so Adelaide decided to swap him for a bigger and stronger Collingwood player called Brett Chalmers.

Sanderson harbours no bitterness to those who culled him.

Indeed, he blames himself for not making the most of his opportunities.

“I probably didn’t handle the notoriety, the bright lights and I wasn’t (Tony) Modra or (Chris) McDermott or (Tony) McGuinness, but people recognised me when I was in a bar and I was 18 years old and I had money to spend. Looking back, I didn’t realise it at the time, I could have been a lot more professional than I was.”

He didn’t last long at Collingwood either. After just a year the Magpies passed the 20-year-old on to Geelong. Then he was dropped for the Grand Final.

“My first four years of AFL footy were just horrific,” Sanderson says now. “That’s the thing with footy. The emotional highs are so high but the lows − they really bottom you out. But that is what forms your character as well.

“Most of my friends are football people. We are very unique characters. We are mentally strong, but we are mentally scarred as well. We have ridden real rollercoaster ride over our careers.”

His year at Collingwood was blighted by a series of hamstring injuries, but he did live with Nathan Buckley, a future captain and coach of the Magpies.

Sanderson says even though his time at Collingwood was a struggle the example set by the famously professional, hard-driven Buckley inspired him to work harder.

It was a competitive household. According to Buckley, there were competitions for everything, top 50 film lists, computer games, backyard cricket and even who could do the dishes quickest.

“He had a strong work ethic from the start,” Buckley says. “If he hadn’t we wouldn’t have been mates.”

To Buckley it was also no surprise that Sanderson was a success in his first year as coach.

“I knew he would build a very strong relationship with his players and staff,” he says. “He has a very strong ability keep it light, but can be strong when he needs to be.”

Sanderson moved to Geelong after being offered a chance to play for the Cats by incoming coach Gary Ayres.

It meant a third club in three years for Sanderson but the lure of playing in a team which included the great Gary Ablett was too great to resist.

“He was an absolute freak,” he says now with a smile. “I have actually got some vision at home on tape to show my grandkids one day of me kicking the ball to Gary Ablett senior.”

At Geelong he was turned from a forward into a defender and after an up and down first season, which culminated in missing the Grand Final, his career finally took off.

“That off season was either going to make me or break me. I could easily have given it away. It (the disappointment) was just too much,” he says.

“But that was the year I got bigger in the gym, I didn’t stop training I just told myself I wanted this so bad I wasn’t going to let anyone else prevent me from making it.”

If his break with the state under-15s was the first big turning point, that summer spanning 1994 and 1995 was the second. He transformed into a regular player, became an All Australian and won a club best and fairest.

The roller-coaster wouldn’t let him off, though.

His last game was a heartbreaking finals loss against Sydney in 2005 where the Swans came from four goals down late in the last quarter and only hit the front with four seconds to play.

It had a lot in common with Adelaide’s loss to Hawthorn last year.

“We were in front with a couple of minutes to go. You know, to have it taken away, it was a horrible experience,” he says.

No wonder that old fear of failure was never far away.

It prompted him to study a Bachelor of Commerce at Deakin University and also qualify as a pilot.

“Because I had that difficult start to my career I always thought that it could end at any point,” he says.

It was in those final years of his playing career that Sanderson started thinking about coaching.

His Geelong mentor Mark Thompson told him he would be good at it.

After he retired at the end of 2005 he took a role as a development coach at Port Adelaide for a year before Geelong asked him to come back as an assistant to Thompson.

It was a great era for the Cats. They won premierships in 2007 and 2009.

When Thompson resigned in 2010, many assumed Sanderson was next in line. But he was overlooked for Chris Scott (who won again in 2011).

It was a disappointment that cut so deep he resolved to walk away from coaching before wife Veronika and Geelong chief executive Brian Cook, the man who ultimately told him he had missed out, persuaded him to hang in there.

David Sanderson says his son was absolutely heartbroken.

“He was more than disappointed; he was going to leave the game really. He thought about working for the AFL rather than being in the coaching system.”

A year later he was Adelaide coach. By the end of the 2012 season he was being hailed as one of the league’s brightest coaching talents after dragging the Crows up to that preliminary final.

Up down, up down.

Sanderson’s quest to take Adelaide one step further begins on Friday against Essendon at AAMI Stadium.

It marks the start of the 39-year-old’s second year in charge, and the expectations will be different. It will be difficult to match the outstanding success of 2012 but as we sit in his office he appears delighted by the challenge.

Sink or swim Sanderson has an easy and enthusiastic way about him. But underneath all that sociability and ease with people lies a tough streak, perhaps forged in those early struggles.

He thinks now the upside of his tough start in the game is that it makes him a better coach.

It makes him better able to understand the fears and doubts that crowd a young player’s brain if they are struggling to fit into the AFL.

“I was a bit unique in that I was at my third club before my 21st birthday. I probably thought the next step would be out altogether,” he says.

The team Sanderson inherited from the departed Neil Craig was a struggling outfit. It had finished 14th and 11th in the previous two seasons and Adelaide appeared to be a club on a downward spiral.

He made immediate adjustments to how the team trained.

He noted the team had come near last in the area of winning the contested ball and introduced a more physical style. There was boxing and wrestling at training.

Players were forced to compete more fiercely for the ball. By the end of last season, the Crows were number one for contested ball.

He also simplified the way the team played.

Chris McDermott was Adelaide’s first captain and watches the team every week in his role as a commentator for FIVEaa.

He says structurally the Crows became a much more direct and long-kicking team.

But he also noted another difference, which is perhaps a reflection of Sanderson’s personality.

He says last year Adelaide cast off the “crowbots” tag which had emerged during the Craig era.

“If Sanderson has done anything he has been able to turn them back into what the sport is all about - that genuine love of playing the game and playing with a freedom and an instinct they never had under Craig,” he says.

“A new world has opened up for them that I don’t think a lot of them knew existed.”

Spend an hour watching the Crows train and you understand why Sanderson is popular with his players.

There is no shouting, no screaming. He walks happily between groups, footy in hand, smile on his face.

Sanderson is one of a new breed of Generation X coaches who have taken over the AFL in recent years.

They talk differently about the game and relate differently to their players than the old-school, more dictatorial approach favoured not so long ago.

“These kids that are coming through now as 18 year olds, they were born in the mid-1990s. They certainly speak a different language to us,” Sanderson says.

They also have different expectations. When Sanderson was a young player it was sink or swim, you were in the team or you weren’t. No explanations were needed.

“The most challenging part of my role is not necessarily relationships, it’s dealing with disappointment,” he says.

“They [the next generation] are incredibly driven and when they don’t get something they want you maybe have to outline the reasons why a bit more.”

It’s an all-consuming job.

Sanderson says it’s the last thing he thinks about before he goes to sleep, the first thing he thinks about in the morning.

He says he even dreams about the game. Although the dreams revolve around playing rather than coaching. “Apparently that is to do with unfulfilled goals, ambitions,” he says.

But he is also trying to give his brain a footy break more often. He has taken up golf at Glenelg, is a movie buff who can rattle off his top 10 films of all time and he has recently married Veronika.

Veronika is from the Czech Republic, the pair met in Dublin, and Sanderson says it is a bonus to go home to someone who is not immersed in the world of football.

For her part Veronika is entertaining company and, with a smile, requests I don’t portray her husband as a saint.

Pressed for his biggest fault though and she says he is too “anti-social”. His idea of a perfect night is one at home with Veronika and their dog Max.

“We can go to movies or go to the beach and completely unwind,” she says.

Although going to see a film with Sanderson in Adelaide is not always a quiet night.

“We went to the movies last week and it was dark and we were climbing the stairs to get to our seat and people were saying ‘go the Crows’ and they can’t even see him properly,” she says.

Sanderson says he avoids being weighed down by the potential goldfish bowl existence of being Adelaide coach by doing his best to ignore it.

“It’s funny because I don’t really expose myself to it. I don’t rush to buy the newspaper and read about us. I don’t race home to watch the news. I am not really out and about that much.”

Anyway he understands he is in a privileged position.

He also understands last year was the honeymoon phase and that in football that can change very quickly.

But most of all he understands there is nothing he would rather be doing.

“I know there is a lot of scrutiny and when things aren’t going well we read about it, about how bad we are, however, none of us would change it. We all love being coaches. It’s such a good job.”

Sanderson heads into the new season looking to bounce back from more setbacks.

That preliminary final loss was sore as was the defection of key player Kurt Tippett.

But if the Sanderson form holds true then Crows’ fans could be in for another bumper year.

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